Mike Finigan: Another type of twitter

Cape Breton Post

Published: Oct 24, 2017 at 2:24 p.m.

Updated: Oct 25, 2017 at 6 a.m.

A chickadee keeps a wary eye open at the backyard feeder.

The feeder is back up. For better or worse.

It was down for the summer, and then some, and I hope it did some good for the finches. It’s strictly blackcapped chickadees, blue jays, woodpeckers and mourning doves out there now though, it seems. And the odd gust of grackles.

Maybe I should keep a lid on my happy mood, but the cat and I were too long a couple of lonesome empty nesters, sitting on the step all summer looking out at what might as well have been a hockey rink.

Waiting.

I need that feeder up there. I need that menagerie out there. It’s one of my few connections to nature. Otherwise I feel more and more like a digital processor. Thoughts in, thoughts out. A sum of metadata. A piece of fuzzy, underdone pixellation. I don’t hunt. I don’t fish. I’d like to fish and will again someday. And, to complete today’s lesson in conjugating the verb, I have fished in the past and enjoyed it, but the notion rarely takes hold of me.

I hike. I’d like to join a bird watching group, if there’s one around; give my hiking a finer point.

Anyway. And there’s not only pestilence and foraging vs. feeding qualms to concern the birds.

There’s life itself.

The other day I pass by the window, perchance to look and see how things are shaping up outside, and this mourning dove comes tilting in from a tall pine, vectored on the feeder’s general direction, wheels down, when a red-tailed hawk whooshes in like a mighty revelation, and seizes it. Bam! A brief airborne struggle ensues, but ends quickly. The hawk, its back to me, wings spread controlling its vertical descent, lowers the dove to the grass. It lands and draws a curtain around the kill, but feathers and down float up regardless, settling, tripping telltale across the autumn leaves.

I’d love to be a hawk if I were a bird. Sharp of shin, of eye, beak, and talon.

But I’m a finch, I’m sure; taking life as it comes. Susceptible to caprice, fickle bird feeders and the like.

A finch that, oddly enough, sits on top of the food chain.

From a book called “Sapiens: a brief history of human kind” written by Yuval Noah Harari, I learned that, once, I was halfway DOWN the chain. Out on the plains of the Serengeti, watching a lion devour a gazelle that it just brought down, my stomach growling in hunger and abject fear. I don’t have a .30-06 bolt action Remington to help me be brave, or a crossbow, or a slingshot. I have a rock and a stick. Waiting until the lion leaves so I can get a bite of gazelle too. Then I’m waiting for the hyenas to get their fill.

By the time everybody else is done, what’s left looks like a turkey carcass after two teenagers raided the fridge. And I’m going in with my rock and my stick to smash open the gazelle’s bones for the marrow. But, providentially, I have thereby just developed a tool, the first of which would set me here, 1,000,000 years later, with my laptop. I step out of the bushes, stop, look around. Shake my stick at a buzzard; take a few more steps, stop. Listen. It’s wild out here. You can’t even take a casual drink of water.

Now? I’m driving to the Sydney River Sobeys, picking out chilled, cured roast beef and a bottle of Woodman’s horseradish. Top of the food chain.

An irony lost on no majestic lion.

Anyway. Meanwhile, back in the yard, the hawk lifts off grandly with its prey, and life at the feeder resumes forthwith.

It’s like we just put in a swimming pool out there.

A primordial swimming pool.

Mike Finigan, from Glace Bay, a former teacher, taxi driver, and railroader, is a freelance writer now living in Sydney River. He can be contacted at cbloosechange@gmail.com.